Breathing Corpses (Oberon Modern Plays)

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With Breathing Corpses Wade wanted to explore the effect of discovering a body on the people who discovered it. The premise of the play is both intriguing and dangerous. She always has you on your toes trying to figure out how these characters are connected, because they are, and who is under the sheets in that bed as we file into the tiny theatre. There are clues in the text as to who it is.

I mean I feel like. I feel like you’re letting this get in the way when it really- It’s a bit. I’m a bit- the doors and the talking rubbish about fish in your eyes and- I’m sorry it happened but I won’t take responsibility and you shouldn’t because we had nothing to do with it and we’re not people that kill people and we’re not- But Wade also points out that while both plays are suffused by death, they are actually about the art of living. Breathing Corpses takes its title from Sophocles' assertion: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse." There is always a simmering sense of danger in David Ferry’s production. Amy the chambermaid who discovers the corpse covered in bed in the first scene has a quiet talk to herself, but you are just waiting for some surprise to happen.

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We return to Amy’s storyline, in a cyclical ending, which, without giving too much away, provides a rather beautiful if somewhat worrying finale. The mixture of lighter scenes and lines with rather brutal violence creates an interesting juxtaposition throughout the production. All this will be fitted in around actually seeing work performed, as Wade has not lost sight of why she started writing in the first place and why she moved east from Bristol to London: “There’s so much to see”, she says. “I go [to the theatre] three times a week and it is impossible to see everything, which is brilliant! If I don’t go at all during a week I feel rubbish. I don’t mean I feel guilty, I just feel funny in myself.” This will hardly be the only review to suggest that hot young playwright Laura Wade seems obsessed with death. Colder Than Here, which opened less than a month ago at Soho, dispassionately followed a dying woman's preparations for eternity. Breathing Corpses is an elusive tale that observes a gruesome cycle of linked deaths.

There are actually those – the enemy within – who would have us live in permanent terror and apprehension about common sense solutions we are proposing. [laughter and applause. Vika approaches her.] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Gloria is a razor-sharp comic drama about ambition, office warfare and hierarchies, where the only thing that matters is selling out to the highest bidder. Gather round, ladies! Here are some powerful and passionate monologues for women in the latter half of their lives (arguably, the best half!) These monologues are all from theatre, if you’re after a film monologue, you can head here, or a monologue from TV, head here. Enjoy! Breathing Corpses is a play by British playwright, Laura Wade, about the discovery of two separate corpses, and the characters tied to the events. In scene four, Elaine is talking to her husband, Jim, who has been going through a tough time after discovering one of these dead bodies in a crate. She enters this scene to find; ‘Jim sits cross-legged on the floor, carefully removing the crews from a brass door handle. Beside him, underneath a camping groundsheet, is a pile of doors.” Jim can’t move past the idea that the moment he opened the crate he cemented the dead woman’s fate: “Maybe in that second when I opened the box, maybe – Like if I hadn’t, maybe she’d have turned up at home a few days later”. And so, in response, Jim has resolved to take all of the doors off their hinges. Elaine, whose patience has completely dried up, is in this monologue trying to get Jim to snap out of it. He’s already ruined Christmas, no one can get through to him, and she thinks enough time has passed for him to be returning to normal. The American premiere, produced by Luna Theater Company, at Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, Oct 2007 with the Chicago premiere being produced by Steep Theatre Jan 2008, directed by Robin Witt.

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Verdict: Breathing Corpses is a unique experience for an audience member and the whole team must be applauded for their collaboration on this dark, multi-faceted, exciting production. In Henrik Ibsen’s three-act drama about a widowed mother and the return of her prodigal son. In a monologue towards the end of act one, Helene Alving, forty-five, is revealing all the horrible things her husband did to her to the minister, Pastor Manders. When Pastor Manders suggests that by having ‘wayward ideas’ and denying her duties Helene had brought upon herself her dysfunctional relationship with her son, she decides that it is time to reveal the truth: the drinking, violence, and boastful infidelity of her husband created an environment so toxic for her son that she had no choice but to do what she did. The piece contains interjections by Manders that would have to be edited out, but with very few changes this would make a great monologue for a performer who is confident at playing with status, class and emotional vulnerability. I don’t care about the business, if you don’t want it anymore, fine, we’ll sell it I don’t care. But you’ll have to do something else. You can’t just stay at home taking the place apart with a screwdriver. Kim Nelson plays Kate and Benjamin Sutherland plays her boyfriend Ben. Their lovemaking is rough and he has the bruises to prove it. She is tough, in control and goes too far. He is boyish and a bit aggressive and turns dangerous when he thinks she might have been mean to his dog. Finally Johnathan Sousa plays Charlie, a smooth-talking, charming guest in the hotel. He chats up Amy. Is he harmless? Is Amy? Director David Ferry always has us guessing. The Production. The production is directed by David Ferry which means the production is elegant and fearless. Most of the scenes have an eerie quietness to them except one scene between a couple who are violent in their lovemaking until it turns dangerous.